The survey was conducted by the University of Surrey as part of the Leverhulme funded research project, Delivering Better for Less: Improving Productivity and Motivation in Public Services.

The Higher Education Survey is concerned with how academics approach multi-tasking, specifically where research and teaching duties conflict. Academics are coming under increasing pressures to raise both research and teaching standards and this work is intended to help provide insights into sensible ways to facilitate these demands. Some interesting gender differences in responses to students were also identified.

Over 1,400 academics in UK Higher Education responded to the Higher Education Survey during the summer of 2016. The survey combined a randomized experiment with the collection of a wealth of additional data. Respondents were asked about hours worked in practice and their division of time between teaching, research and administrative duties. They also answered questions on their preferences for, and productivity in, both teaching and research.

The randomized experiment, embedded within the survey, measured how much time academics would devote to students outside of office hours. This was in the context of a conflict between teaching (an exam) and research (a grant application) duties. The hypothesis was that a higher expectation of help on the part of a student would lead to more time being devoted to help the student by an academic. High expectations did indeed prove to be correlated significantly with how much time was devoted to responding to email requests about the forthcoming exam. Given that research has long been held to drive career progression for academics, devoting such extra time to students potentially comes at a personal cost. This reflects a pro-social approach by academics to their teaching responsibilities. This is at a time when the new teaching excellence framework, linking funding to universities to measures of teaching quality, is being piloted in our universities with imposed teaching quality targets. This raises the question of whether quality targets will reduce the intrinsic motivation of academics to help their students and actually reduce rather than increase public service productivity.

The survey also revealed important differences between the responses of male and female academics. Women in senior academic roles reported a significantly higher percentage of their time devoted to administration duties impacting on the time they could devote to students. However, women at all levels in male dominated science departments dedicated considerably more time to students, when in conflict with research duties, than their counterparts in other departments. Whether this reflects the expected role of women in science departments or other factors will be the subject of further research.

A working paper detailing these findings will be released on this website early in 2017.

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